Passionate Sage (26 page)

The contrast between Adams's and Jefferson's thinking on the question of female education is instructive. Although Jefferson claimed to give education more thought than any other subject during his retirement years, he admitted that the education of women “has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me,” adding that the matter “has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my daughters required.” Jefferson had encouraged his daughters to study music, the fine arts, and the more refined topics, “which might enable them, when they became mothers, to educate their own daughters….” He presumed that mothers would have no responsibility for educating their sons, unless the fathers “should be lost, or incapable, or inattentive.” Adams, on the other hand, thought that mothers should be responsible for educating all children, sons and daughters alike. He apprised his granddaughter that she would be derelict in her duty as a mother if she failed to introduce all her children to philosophy, literature, and history. This meant, he informed her, that she herself had to develop a familiarity with Locke's
Essay on Human Understanding
, Dugald Stewart's
Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind
, then the works of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Condillac, and Turgot. Some of these authors advocated dangerous ideas, he warned, but the republican mother needed to master these ideas in order to assure that her children would be exposed to them in a safe and proper fashion. While part of him feared women like Mercy Otis Warren, then, another part of him proclaimed that she was the ideal that subsequent generations of American women should strive to emulate.
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Adams thought about the emotions or passions in much the same way he thought about aristocracies: they were powerful forces for good and ill, damnably difficult to control, most efficacious when confined within well-guarded compartments or well-delineated spheres of action. The political compartment in which he hoped, rather vainly, to confine the inevitable aristocrats of American society was the Senate. The social sphere in which he believed it safe to release emotional emergies included close friends like Rush, Jefferson, and Warren; but the main and safest arena was the family. Of course, being Adams, vows of caution and restraint were incessantly violated, indiscretions regularly escaped the private circle of friends and family and burst into public view, where they did damage and exposed him to criticism. But within the family, which was after all the place where he lived out the entirety of his long retirement, the disarmingly honest habits of his heart could play themselves out without fear of ridicule; there his compulsion to connect enjoyed its most natural habitat.

“Why you seem to know nothing about me,” he teased old friend Vanderkemp; “I have grandchildren and great grandchildren, multiplying like the seed of Abraham. You have no idea of the prolific quality of the New England Adamses. Why, we have contributed more to the population of America, and cut down more trees, than any other race.” There was truth in the joke, since the four children whom he and Abigail had brought into the world generated separate branches of their own, which in turn produced yet another permutation of direct descendants and in-laws. Moreover, a strikingly large number of this extended family ended up living at the Adams homestead in Quincy. The procession of children, grandchildren, eventually great-grandchildren, improvident in-laws, and stray relatives began with Sally Smith, the widow of the alcoholic son, Charles; Sally moved in with her two daughters in 1801, followed soon thereafter by youngest son, Thomas Boylston, along with his wife and the inevitable grandchildren, then by the three grandchildren by John Quincy and Louisa Catherine, who used the Adams homestead as a permanent depository for children during their diplomatic postings in Russia and Europe. And this was just the start. When the staff of servants, maids, cooks, and gardeners was added to the compliment, the household had the day-by-day feel of a hotel occupied at all times by at least three generations of Adamses. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the social and physical context in which Adams lived out his life mirrored his own psychological complexity—part farm, part orphanage, part salon, part retirement village, part shrine, all bustle.
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Within this ever-shifting domestic context, Adams could afford to indulge his craving for emotional expression; targets for his passionate release of affection presented themselves on a daily basis; and energies that would otherwise have been bottled up, then exploded onto the world in frantic bursts, flowed out of him more evenly and calmly. “Love to Louisa and her dear Boys,” he exclaimed to John Quincy in 1815, remembering how the presence of his grandchildren in the house buoyed his spirits:

 

Oh! how I want John to divert me and George to assist me! Charles is a little Jewell too! how delighted I should be to have them all about me. Yet they would devour all my Strawberries, Cherries, Courants, Plumbs, Peaches, Pears and Apples. And what is worse they would get into my Bedchamber [and] disarrange all the Papers on my writing Table.
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He relished the role of over-indulgent grandfather, apprising a young man who married his granddaughter, Abby, that only he was permitted to call her “Hussie” the fact that Abby was only sixteen years old gave him no pause, he declared, since she had announced that she wanted to marry and produce another great-grandchild for “Mr. President.” The young man was about to discover the greatest joys of domestic life, Adams observed, which were “Peace, Nourishment, Copulation, and Society.”
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Schooling, of course, received his intense scrutiny and most frequent comments. “I am afraid you will be offended at my freedom,” he wrote to grandson George, “but you are in your hand writing, at such an immense distance behind your two Brothers that I cannot abstain from urging you to…sett your Commas, Semicolons, Colons and points ‘exactly' right.” This was an urging that younger members of the Adams tribe usually mocked, given their grandfather's notoriously eccentric way with punctuation. After George and John were sent off to England to join their parents in 1815—John Quincy was negotiating the Treaty of Ghent at the time—the benevolent patriarch wrote his grandchildren to continue the practice, one might say the Adams family obsession, of recording their impressions in a journal:

 

I wish you to have a pencil book, always in your pocket, by which you may note [?] on the spot any remarkable thing you may see or hear…. A journal, a diary, is indispensable…. Without a minute diary, your travels will be no better than the flight of birds through the air; they will have no time behind them. Whatever you write preserve. I have bushels of my silly notes, written in fits of impatience and humiliation. “These fair creatures are thyself.” And are now more useful and influential on self examination than all the sermons of the clergy.
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He established a daily schedule that assured not only a balanced blend of physical and intellectual exercise but also a regular period of interaction with various members of the third generation of Adamses. Most mornings he was up at dawn, then out in the garden or fields working with his hands when weather permitted. The afternoon was reserved for correspondence, reading, and banter, all of which required the presence of grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and young in-laws to take dictation, copy letters, or read to him when his ever-failing eyesight gave out. We can catch only glimpses of the easy intimacies established in this comfortable context, since proximity made a written account unnecessary and therefore the most important emotional connections eluded even the most self-revealing family correspondence in American history.

But glimpses do survive; and they suggest an old man at peace with himself at last, dispensing wisdom and love with what might be termed a relaxed intensity in a setting that allowed his affections to flow. He regularly referred to John Quincy's sons as “my dear boys,” claiming that “George is a rage, John a Hero, and Charles, both I hope….” He shared with George an essay in the
Essex Register
that, as he put it, contained “a story about me…which represents me as a more blustering coxcomb than I ever was in my Life.” He threatened to recall “all my Posterity, Children, grand children and great grand children,” then “give them a hall at Montezillo” where they could help him hammer out more accurate account of his “best blusterings.” In the early 1820s, as part of his campaign to bolster the reputation of New Englanders in making the history of the country, he gathered together the sermons, journals, and histories of several Puritan patriarchs, then orchestrated daily reading sessions for all the youngsters in his bedchamber. When they complained, he acknowledged that the old books exhibited “superstition, fanaticism, quaintness, cant, barbarous poetry, and uncouthness of style…,” but argued that watching his progeny take turns reading out loud generated in him “as ardent an interest as I ever felt in reading Homer or Virgil, Milton, Pope, or Shakespeare.” There is even a glimpse of Abigail intruding into these grandfatherly scenes, scolding him for spoiling the youngsters with candy and fruit; once, while he was dictating a letter in which he lamented being “coaxed by a fascinating Woman into a Subscription” for a book he did not really want, she leaned over and jotted at the bottom: “‘ah poor Man, dalilah has shorn his Locks.' Not his wife, however.” In this atmosphere of casual intimacy his candor was a precious gift, not a political liability; his eccentricities were the butt of loving jokes, not public ridicule; his craving for approval and affection was constantly and routinely satisfied, not blocked and congested into pathetic bundles of self-pity; his compulsions expressed themselves in acts of affection rather than flashes of anger. “I assure you in the sincerity of a Father,” he wrote John Quincy in 1815, that “the last Fourteen years have been the happiest of my life.”
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“Your husband is a phenomenon equally strange and uncommon,” Adams wrote to Louisa Catherine in 1823. “I have ransacked my old imagination and memory to find out some comparison to which he may be likened,” he added, then concluded that John Quincy was most like “an Indian warriour, suffering under the most cruel torments of his Enemies,” enduring the torture without any discernible change in his facial expression, chanting a prayer to the gods that went: “I go to the place where my father is gone. His soul shall rejoice in the fame of his Son….” It was the most revealing statement Adams ever made about John Quincy, for it simultaneously expressed his enormous paternal pride and his equally powerful worry that his son would repeat the mistakes he had made—dedicating himself to an impossible ideal of virtuous public service that never received the popular support it deserved. And it acknowledged that there was something “strange and uncommon” about his most learned and accomplished child, something flawed or missing or overdeveloped in his character that made happiness in this world highly problematic, something that, as an over-active parent, he might have misguidedly helped to create. This overlapping pride and worry became the dominant feature of Adams's emotional life during his last decade, as John Quincy, always the apple of his eye, became the central object of his most troubled affections.
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On the one hand, the correspondence between father and son continued the tradition of paternal advice and patriarchal supervision begun when John Quincy was a boy. “My advice to you is, study Epictetus in Greek as I did, more than fifty years ago,” Adams wrote in 1815, recommending patience to a son then negotiating the terms of the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812. “My Son, you must be cool, candid & respectfully frank with those Britons,” he advised that same year, suggesting that British threats to continue the war should not be taken seriously and offering his own shrewd assessment of the strategic reasons for playing a strong hand: “They have not the power, & the more they attempt it the more they will be convinced of their error. They seem not to be sensible, that if they drive us to extremities, which they cannot, we should meet the friendship of their Enemies over the whole globe. And whatever they may think, they have enemies enough.” Thoughts of his son jousting with English diplomats about American fishing rights off Labrador and Newfoundland and the impressment of American seamen conjured up memories of his own role in negotiating the very same issues in 1783. He was sure, he confided jokingly to John Quincy, that this time, like last, an Adams would prove “too fluent for them.” On the other hand, he was worried that John Quincy would win the peace at the expense of his political reputation at home: “Such are the collisions of Interests, Passions, Prejudices, & Sacrifices, between the two Nations, that I am apprehensive, you will lose in England, as I did, all the popularity you have acquired by such hazards, much labors, such services!”

But the fearful commiserations were less frequent than the fatherly advice, often delivered in a bittersweet style that mocked his own capacity to teach his learned son any lessons he did not already know perfectly well. “Where shall the beginning, the middle and the end of an oration be,” he asked rhetorically, “when the orator has nothing to say?” After the negotiations at Ghent had ended, he could not resist reviewing the old refrains: remember that history is “a book of parodoxes,” that “extreme distress will ever alone bring forth the real character of this Nation,” that popular opinion is forever fickle: “The People of the United States are the most conceited people that ever existed on this Globe,” he remarked in 1816, “the most proud, vain, ambitious, suspicious, jealous…and I am as guilty of any of them. Have a care of them!”
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